Papers › TIMEN: An Open Temporal Expression Normalisation Resource

TIMEN: An Open Temporal Expression Normalisation Resource

1 May 2012LREC 2012 5archive 2025-07-28

Hector Llorens, Leon Derczynski, Robert Gaizauskas, Estela Saquete

Temporal expressions are words or phrases that describe a point, duration or recurrence in time. Automatically annotating these expressions is a research goal of increasing interest. Recognising them can be achieved with minimally supervised machine learning, but interpreting them accurately (normalisation) is a complex task requiring human knowledge. In this paper, we present TIMEN, a community-driven tool for temporal expression normalisation. TIMEN is derived from current best approaches and is an independent tool, enabling easy integration in existing systems. We argue that temporal expression normalisation can only be effectively performed with a large knowledge base and set of rules. Our solution is a framework and system with which to capture this knowledge for different languages. Using both existing and newly-annotated data, we present results showing competitive performance and invite the IE community to contribute to a knowledge base in order to solve the temporal expression normalisation problem.

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Tasks

Information RetrievalKnowledge Base PopulationQuestion AnsweringTimex normalization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Timex normalization TimeBank TIMEN F1-Score 0.89 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

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